Civitas sine suffragio: a new (old) concept for critical geopolitics

ABSTRACT

The concept of civitas sine suffragio captures how accumulation regimes generate threshold-spaces of dispossession and inclusive exclusion through the environment-making state’s production of space. From an archaeo-genetic investigation of the frontier of the Roman imperium, the article suggests the concept as a recurrent technique of economic inclusion and political exclusion in the state’s production of space across modes of production. As part of an agenda in critical geopolitics to investigate the operations of ‘geo-power’ at sub/supra-national scales, the article goes on to question formal citizenship as a sufficient guarantor of civil rights, constitutional protections, and democratic political participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• historical materialism
• political geography
• Roman Empire

Introduction

A key problem across the field of political geography concerns the notion of citizenship, and more specifically what we might call the spatiality of citizenship (Kurtz & Hankins, 2005; Marston & Staeheli, 1994; Painter & Philo, 1995; Smith, 1989). Simply put, what does our location and relation in space mean for our existence in a political community? In liberal societies, formal or juridical citizenship is considered to be one of the most effective guarantors of civil rights, constitutional protections, and democratic political participation, but what about ‘invisible citizen activity’ (MacKian, 1995, p. 212). What about that dimension to citizenship that is ‘more than a status held by individuals that empowers them to claim rights’ (Isin & Nielsen, 2008, p. 2), and that ‘instead involves relationships that condition individuals’ positioning, capacities, and agencies with respect to a collective’ (Staeheli, Marshall, and Maynard, 2016, p. 379)? What if the very notion of formal citizenship is troubled by shifting epistemes, the transformation of state forms, or by paradigmatic changes in the mode of production? We have good reasons to question the efficacy of formal citizenship in securing freedoms (Wolff, 2006), especially given that so many of the legal, political, and epistemic frameworks to which citizenship is bound are being destabilized and dissolved in the capitalist world-system (Marston & Mitchell, 2004; Sassen, 1996; Tambini, 2001).

For instance, citizenship in the United States lies on a horizon of expectation for many who aspire to the political participation and security traditionally thought to flow from it, but is this really the case in a federal topology so idiomatically generative of asymmetric social spaces. Whether in financial arbitrages across state borders, the jurisdictional overlapping of school-districts with municipal-fiscal authorities, the exemptions and special statuses of Indian reservations, the carefully orchestrated smörgåsbord of municipal beach passes, or in zonal practices such as gerrymandering, the use made by the state of spatial asymmetries established through the social production of space to reproduce uneven social relations is striking. Migrant labourers in particular are just one group, though a very large group, for whom the adequacy of formal citizenship ought to be seriously scrutinized, when one takes into account the inclusive exclusions that spatial dispositioning emplaces in their lived lives.

These problems with the reality of formal citizenship open up the concept of citizenship to a historical materialist kind of analysis that has the potential to provide us with some answers as to why the promise of formal citizenship can so easily be frustrated in capitalist societies. By bringing the spatiality of citizenship into relation with accumulation imperatives of surplus formation through the coordinating medium of the environment-making state, we can start to see how a recurrent spatial structure of dispossession and domination is repeatedly produced through history, irrespective of our formal juridico-political efforts to the contrary. As we shall see, the aesthetic spatial structure of inclusion-exclusion can be identified as far back as the Roman Empire, and it has resurfaced in various forms across modes of production ever since.

In the social metabolism of contemporary capitalism, we can then be forgiven for doubting the automatic emancipatory potential in formal citizenship for those categories already disadvantaged materially and discursively in a social topology that is fundamentally and internally asymmetric to their further disadvantage. Irrespective of formal citizenship, can we not say that the subaltern are often in practice consigned spatially to a de facto kind of second-class citizenship by the very way space is socially produced? Perhaps the key question we are left with is whether or not there are other ways of thinking about citizenship in the spatiality of capital’s empire, more protean and challenging ways for grasping the social reality in the concept that formalist preoccupations simply miss?

The sustained thought below is that a more materialist, historical, and geographical approach to the broader notion of citizenship can be useful for engaging some of these questions, and that particular attention paid to the aesthetic production of space can serve us well in our efforts to understand the recurrent ways in which capital generates a political geography conducive to its ends.

Citizenship in critical geopolitics

Citizenship is a ‘slippery concept’ (Staeheli, 2010, p. 393). Its discursive landscape is vast and ranging, and the debates around it are multifaceted and elusive. Succinctly, there are many different citizenships (Isin & Wood, 1999). There is little utility in engaging the huge literature that has accumulated around the notion of citizenship, but something must be said to position what follows below, so that the value of a historical materialist contribution can be appreciated. As the intention here is to add something to the field of critical geopolitics, I shall confine myself to addressing some recent work on citizenship in that field.

A critical geopolitics of citizenship has emerged in political geography over the last couple of decades that looks to take the topic beyond the formal, institutional, and juridico-political framework in which studies of citizenship have traditionally been approached in the discipline of geography when feeding off the adjacent disciplines of law and political science. The new direction prefers to explore the informal and practical composition of citizenship through the production of space, the establishment of social relations, and the generation of identity between the political and socio-cultural spheres (Isin & Wood, 1999; Kallio & Mills, 2016; Marston & Staeheli, 1994; Mitchell, 2007; Spinney et al., 2015).

Pushing beyond the national framework, Lynn Staeheli is of the opinion that we should investigate citizenship as ‘a status and a set of relationships by which membership is constructed through physical and metaphorical boundaries and in the sites and practices that give it meaning’ (Staeheli, 2010, p. 394). Immediately we can see here the central aspects to this political geography of citizenship: 1) the importance of practices, behaviours, and subjectivities; 2) the significance of relationality; and 3) the problem of borders, boundaries, and limits.

While bracketing the formal superstructure of laws and political institutions, this literature emphasizes mundane behaviour and the ‘practices of citizenship’ (Staeheli, 2018, p. 62). It investigates those activities, norms, and adopted attitudes that contribute to ‘making up the citizen’ (Cresswell, 2013, p. 81). Put another way, it focuses on the subjectivity formation of citizenship through the production of space and the ways in which subjects are then socialized to behave and self-identify in particular ways. This is not dissimilar to the notion of ‘engaged citizens’ (Hammett, 2018), who are simultaneously responsiblized and depoliticized for development outcomes in advanced capitalist societies. The assumption is that there exists a ‘malleability’ or ‘instrumentality’ in citizenship formation that forteaches individuals ‘how to act as citizens through formal and informal means’ (Staeheli, 2018, p. 62), and that there is an intimate spatial dimension to this formation. These ‘pedagogies of citizenship’ entrench views and behaviours, so that ‘abstract moral values become instrumentalized’.

In an evidently Bourdieusian way, this is the habitus of the citizen (Isin, 2008, 2012). It is part of ‘the specific constellation of orientations, strategies and technologies that are available for enacting solidaristic, agonistic or alienating modes of being with each other’ (Isin, 2008, p. 38). This begs the question as to what kind of spatial production contributes to the shaping and development of this habitus, in which the practices of citizenship are learned and the ‘acts of citizenship’ are contrived, and to how acts of citizenship can break with this habitus (Isin & Nielsen, 2008). We are left with the question of where these behavioural norms are shaped; from where do they come? How are these practices vectored onto the citizen fabriqué between the state and a socio-cultural production of space?

Citizenship is constructed through a complex set of relationships among qualities, norms, interactions, and positionings with respect to a collective, a collective that itself could be undergoing transformation (Staeheli, Marshall, and Maynard, 2016, p. 378).

The answer seems therefore to lie somewhere in the production of social relations, from which citizenship emerges in ‘the norms and values produced through particular social identities, materialities, spaces and communities of practice’ (Spinney et al., 2015, p. 327). The relationality of space is central to critical geopolitics, wherein citizenship is conceived ‘as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens that ebbs and flows’ (Jeffrey & Staeheli, 2016, p. 483; Spinney et al., 2015, p. 325; Lewis, 2004, p. 3). The ‘new relationships of citizenship’ are those that arise

between individuals, communities, nationalities, and states, and they are positioned within complex topographies of social, economic, and political locations. Those locations, however, are also material, meaning that these relationships are built, experienced, and contested in the homes, streets, and cities in which people live and that also contribute to the ways they see and learn their worlds (Jeffrey & Staeheli, 2016, p. 483).

If an emphasis on the materiality of these relations is vital, how can we characterize this materiality in a way that treats citizenship as both ‘a status and set of relations’ (Spinney et al., 2015, p. 325)? We have to navigate between both the structures of citizenship (Swerts, 2017), as well as the motions of citizenship (Cresswell, 2013). The need for a dynamic architecture leads us to an aesthetic kind of materialism, one that appropriately grasps the spatial simultaneity of inclusion-exclusion, that highlights the structure of citizenship, and thus opens the door to a political geography that recognizes the importance of contradiction.

… relationships between state, civil society, and market are fused in structuring citizenship. Rather than the autonomous citizen who participates in a clearly defined, analytically distinct public sphere governed by a sovereign entity that is assumed in liberal theories of citizenship, these examples highlight the complex interrelationships that structure a field in which a subject – a citizen – might operate … It also suggests the importance of more explicit efforts to examine the topographies that create similarities and differences in the ways in which citizenship is experienced, understood, and enacted (Staeheli, 2010, p. 398).

Scrutinizing borders, boundaries, and spatial interstices is therefore an important element in this aesthetic materialism, as we try to understand ‘how citizenship becomes inscribed in the intersections between political and social-cultural ‘spaces’’ (Painter & Philo, 1995, p. 109). There are aesthetic structures and striations across the plane of civil society that disturb the ‘unvariegated discourse of civil society’ (Jeffrey & Staeheli, 2018, p. 112), that perhaps make the difference between ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2004, pp. 38–41), and that need to be identified and analysed. By coordinating practical subjectivity formation, relationality, and the problem of borders or limits in our critical geopolitics of the citizen, we can then get past a recurring problem in contemporary political geography: scale.

Political geography has been trying to explore beyond certain scales in the discussion of citizenship (e.g. the nation-state), so as to avoid ‘homogenising a variegated social field, cloaking the operation of power in technical language of democratisation or state consolidation’ (Jeffrey & Staeheli, 2018, p. 112). Instead, we are tasked with locating the ‘floating sites of citizenship formation’ (Staeheli, Marshall, and Maynard, 2016, p. 378), and discerning what is common to them regardless of scale.

If the borders of citizenship are everywhere – at the physical boundary of national territories, in communities, in political practices and policies, in social norms, embodied in individuals – then the sites of citizenship must be similarly ubiquitous (Staeheli, 2010, p. 395).

To this end. we are looking for an aesthetic materialist political geography that can provide a ‘multiscalar’ approach to citizenship formation (Staeheli, 2003), or better still one that steps outside the categorical framework of scale altogether in favour of an approach that operates on an isomorph than runs through any and all scales.

Rather than attempting to locate citizenship in specific sites or scales, our attention is directed to the relationships through which citizenship is constructed, enacted, and given meaning (Staeheli, Marshall, and Maynard, 2016, p. 383).

Identifying and locating this isomorphic relation is therefore a central task in this critical geopolitics of citizenship formation. In combining the importance of practices, behaviours, and subjectivities, with the significance of relationality, as well as the problem of borders, boundaries, and limits, we now can establish the starting point for a historical materialist geopolitics of citizenship in advanced capitalist societies. In the words of Staeheli, Marshall, and Maynard, this is a materialist ‘intimacy-geopolitics of citizenship formation’ (2016, p. 377), but one that can cut through all scales.

A materialist geography of citizenship

Historical materialist geography is oriented around a number of general questions, when it comes to matters of space and spatiality: How is space produced to separate us from the product of our labour, to subordinate us to masters, to place us inside/outside of a political community, irrespective of (or perhaps coordinate with) de jure forms? How can we characterize such space heuristically, critically, and usefully for practical struggle through asymmetric social relations outside of the formal institutional or juridical channels? How can we understand our relation to this space, or our location in this space, in ways that are self-illuminating and that generate consciousness? Perhaps most importantly, how can we conceptualize this space effectively for social and political critique?

This aesthetic notion of inside/outside is paramount, as will become more apparent as we develop the structure of the threshold-space below. There has maybe persisted too great an emphasis placed on the ‘fundamentally exclusionary impetus’ in advanced capitalism (Painter & Philo, 1995), which is presumed to operate in the state’s formation of citizenship and its construction of borders. Opposing vectors of exclusion and inclusion have been mapped onto discrete and separate individuals centred around the notion of ‘othering’ (Staeheli, 2018; see also Kofman, 1995, pp. 121–122), but this has missed the ways in which individuals or groups can be simultaneously included and excluded by the social production of space. We have to explore past the ‘normative, exclusionary models of citizenship’ (Marston, 1995, p. 197), and into those spaces that at once include and exclude for very real material reasons. If our concern is therefore with ‘the interplay between de facto and de jure means of inclusion and exclusion’ (Marston & Staeheli, 1994, p. 844), then that means finding a way to look at material relations within an aesthetic production of social space.

The kind of space I would like to conceptualize is the threshold-space essential to the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The limitless spatial production of expansionary thresholds is the business of the state under a capitalist logic (Marx, 1993, p. 334, 408; Luxemburg, 2003; Marx and Engels, 2008; Mies, 1986; Mészáros, 2000; Moore, 2015; Patel & Moore, 2017, pp. 18–22; Welsh, 2017). The capitalist state ‘generally enforces a legal system structured around the reproduction of capital’ (Parisot, 2016, p. 37), but it also ‘strives to produce a geographical landscape favourable to its own reproduction and subsequent evolution’ (Harvey, 2015, p. 146). The outcome is a politically produced (socially and culturally reproduced) juridico-material landscape. In this landscape, social asymmetries are required for the uneven development essential to the logic of capital and the geography of surplus accumulation (Smith, 2010). The threshold-space is elemental in this fundamentally asymmetric topology.

Historical materialist analysis is one long investigation into the means by which surpluses are produced, realized, and distributed in a mode of production through apparatuses that are as cultural, ideological, religious, and spatial as they are explicitly political (see Marx, 1998; Wood, 2016). Appropriate spatial apparatuses are therefore required in every mode of production to realize the enduring imperatives both to accumulate (Marx, 1990, 1993) and to govern (Foucault, 2007, 2010), which together can be encompassed in the expression government of accumulation (Welsh, 2018, 2021a; Ross and Welsh, 2023). For the successful government of accumulation, there is a tendency for congenial and efficacious knowledge-complexes to be contrived that are historically appropriate to a given social conjuncture (Ó Tuathail and Agnew, 1992: 192), but that are nevertheless informed and influenced by ‘older means of control, borrowed from the old sovereign societies’ that ‘come back into play, adapted as necessary’ for the government of accumulation (Deleuze, 1995, p. 182).

In spatial terms, the government of accumulation is enabled by the recurrent reproduction of an asymmetric social topology with the capacity to ‘ensure a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations’ (Foucault, 2002, pp. 361–362). Individuals and groups are repeatedly consigned into a set of social relations to bring about the separation of individuals from the product of their labour simultaneous to the pacification of their resistance by establishing and inculcating into them a ‘spatio-temporal identification’ to this end (Federici, 2004, p. 143).

The ‘identification’ (subjectivation) established in capital’s threshold-space is aesthetic, and the operation of this aesthesis recurs throughout the history of accumulation regimes. The term aesthesis here alludes simply to those ‘a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’. It is a ‘delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience’ (Rancière, 2013, p. 8). The aesthetic here works through a certain ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 1999: 21-42; 2013:, p. 93; see also Welsh, 2016). The asymmetric dynamic that generates the aesthetic distribution of the sensible is thus an element of the raison d’état (reason of/for the state), and therefore an element in the technical repertoire of the state. In furnishing a distribution of the sensible, the knowledge-complexes of the state establish a territory upon which the raison d’état of governmental power can be realized (Foucault, 2007).

Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ban as a production of space inhabited by homo sacer is instructive for understanding the ambiguous kind of spatio-temporal identification in the threshold-space. It is a paradoxical and relational space of ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 7, 15-19), whereby objects of control are consigned to a spatial state of exception which is rendered into a territory by virtue of the spatial isomorph common to those on whom it is applied. This is an augmentation of Carl Schmitt’s notion of the Grenzbegriff (Limit Concept), a conceptualization of a liminal space of ambiguity, in which the genuinely political moment of decision is produced. Neither purely juridical, nor purely extra-juridical, the exceptional moment that this space makes possible is a space that simultaneously excludes and includes. In fact, the ambiguousness of the space is essential to its function. Agamben developed this juridical notion of the Grenzbegriff into a way for us to understand how an aesthetic spatial apparatus produces objects of control in the social reproduction of power relations. For Agamben, this ‘zone of anomie’ complicates the topographical opposition of the boundary or limit into ‘a more complex topological relation, in which the very limit of the juridical order is at issue’ (2005:, p. 23).

The ban is a form of relation. But precisely what kind of relation is at issue here, when the ban has no positive content and the terms of the relation seem to exclude (and, at the same time, to include) each other? The ban is the … simple positing of relation with the nonrelational. In this sense, the ban is identical with the limit form of relation (Agamben, 1998, p. 29).

The aesthetic space to which Agamben alludes is then both absolute and relational (see Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 38–39), and it is in the contradiction between relational/non-relational that we see inclusive exclusion made possible in the threshold-space. As a concept, this inclusive exclusion can be expressed historically and concretely in a great variety of ways, but in the abstract structure of its form we can identify the historical-material recurrence of the technique of inclusive exclusion in the state’s government of accumulation. In an historical materialist perspective, civitas sine suffragio is the genetic name I give to this spatial technique.

Civitas sine suffragio is therefore the aesthetic production of space by which individuals or groups are placed simultaneously inside the reach of economic dispossession, whilst being consigned without the legitimate political community. As a knowledge-complex of the state, the concept then has significant implications for understanding the coordinating nexus of migration, citizenship, labour, imperialism, and the government of accumulation in global political economy today, but in a way that takes us simultaneously within and beyond the nation-state formation.

History, knowledge, and the state in critical geopolitics

The concept of civitas sine suffragio offers a simultaneously extended and succinct means for grasping the threshold-space to capital in a way that combines a historical materialist geography with a spatiality of social relations that can concretely orient contemporary struggles in an increasingly post-national capitalist world-system. As a contribution to the canonical base of ‘critical geopolitics’ (Agnew, 1998; Dalby, 1991; Ó Tuathail, 1996), this article therefore is part of a longstanding agenda to move our geographical gaze beyond the ‘reification of state territorial spaces as fixed [ahistorical] units of secure sovereign space’ that conceptually rule out ‘spatial variation other than between homogeneous blocks of territorial space’ (Agnew, 1994, p. 77). Given such a problematization of borders and boundaries, the kind of geopolitical threshold-space I would like to investigate is more precisely the frontier threshold produced historically by states again and again in the imperial government of accumulation (more on this below). The aesthetic approach to spatiality outlined above seems more fitting to the analysis of supra/sub-national socio-political formations, and particularly to the study of ‘emergent, post-Westphalian political geographies’ (Brenner, 1999, p. 67; Anderson, 1996, p. 151; see also Purcell, 2003).

One way of doing this is by delving historically into the spatialities of social and political formations that pre-date the emergence of the nation-state, which often means feudal or empire formations. To this end, we shall make a brief sojourn into the frontier of the Roman Empire, in order to say something about the concept of civitas sine suffragio as a ‘social production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991). Though the substance of this brief journey is historical, the objective definitely bears upon the spatialities of contemporary societies, for the frontier threshold-space is as ubiquitous in historical capitalism as it is enduring and recurrent. The frontier of the world-system no longer exists conveniently out there on a circumferential edge expanding since the long sixteenth century (Wallerstein, 2011; see also Webb, 1964), but exists all around us ‘inverted’ into the so-called ‘core’ states (Moore, 2015; Welsh, 2020a, 2020b, 2021b), forging new ‘semi-peripheries’ in unanticipated places. The basic aim is to contribute to our spatial understanding of the persistent production of these spaces beyond the level of the nation-state formation and into the spaces of the sub/supra-national.

Is it really necessary though to delve right back to Antiquity? After all, what can the ancient world tell us about the production of space in modern political economy or advanced capitalism? On the first page of his Critical Geopolitics, Gearóid Ó Tuathail points out that ‘the geography of the world is not a product of nature, but a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space’, which of course means that study of these histories is an imperative. He furthermore reminds us explicitly how ‘imperial systems throughout history, from classical Greece and Rome to China and the Arab world, exercised their power through their ability to impose order and meaning upon space’ (1996:, p. 1). Therefore, the study of Antiquity is in fact highly pertinent to the study of critical geopolitics.

JS Richardson alluded to the ‘vocabulary of empire’ that we have inherited from Rome and that has been innovated in western political culture ever since (1998:, p. 1). Historical reflection on the Roman precursor nevertheless has the potential to bring out our ‘sense of familiarity’ with this vocabulary, which exists latently ‘in the mind of a modern observer’, and which sometimes requires a nudge to become explicitly recognized.¹ While consciously avoiding the historical ‘dust-heap’ of conceptual complacency (MacKian, 1995), study of the Roman vocabulary of empire can help us to understand better the spatiality of imperial formations in a way that is not merely more applicable to post-national states, but one that is essential for today’s ‘empire of capital’ (Harvey, 2003; Panitch & Gindin, 2013; Wood, 2003, 2016). As we shall see, the ‘complex interaction’ between Rome and the ‘local populations’ of its imperium gave rise to certain techniques in the government of accumulation, and those techniques were instrumental in ‘the formation of a frontier society … that played an important role in the history of the empire as a whole’ (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, p. 12). This is not to ‘trans-historicize empires’ by riding roughshod over idiomatic differences, but ‘to locate the relations between empires and specific social forms with their own internal dynamics’ (Parisot, 2016, p. 31). If the human geography of the Roman frontier was ‘similar in some basic ways to American frontier society’ (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, p. 12), then our understanding of the modern frontier of the world-system can benefit from study of the frontier of Roman imperium. The point is not a direct sociological comparison between time periods, nor is it to establish a transhistorical red thread, but rather to identify in the past a social production of space that seems to resurface when accumulation regimes, and particularly imperial accumulation regimes, require it.

Historical reflection facilitates our ability to perceive the structural, where we might otherwise perceive merely the aleatory, voluntarist, contingent, local, or coincidental. But does a historical analysis of accumulation structures and processes risk being anachronistic when applied to pre-capitalist contexts, especially for those of the ancient world (see Champion, 1989 Parisot, 2016; Rowlands, 1987;)? This brief foray into the structures of accumulation and domination in the Roman Empire makes no specific claims regarding capitalism, but rather makes a limited claim regarding accumulation and domination in general. If we accept that a sharp distinction between modernity and the past is difficult to maintain in terms of capitalism, and that to identify capitalistic features of pre-capitalist accumulation regimes is legitimate (Bang, 2003, p. 207), it might be viable therefore to say that ‘features of the modem world-system may apply to the ancient world’ (Woolf, 1990, p. 47; see also Ekholm & Friedman, 1979; Banaji, 2016, 2020). Accumulation and domination are enduring features of all historical modes of production, at least according to historical materialist analysis. To identify a particular technique of accumulation and domination in the past, is thus not to insinuate capitalism anachronistically or teleologically into pre-capitalist social formations, but rather to indicate the profound recurrence of certain features or techniques of accumulation and domination across modes of production in ‘capitalist civilization’ (see Wallerstein, 1995).

Given the deeply classical provenance of our concepts of citizenship, the Roman Empire ‘can provide us with a laboratory for investigating what does and does not work in dealing with the interlocking issues of citizenship’ in a framework outside of the nation-state container (Mathisen, 2006, p. 1012). However, the Roman example does not merely give us insight into citizenship and the space of civitas sine suffragio. It also allows us to explore the broader question of how a political community was brought into relation with world-economy, at sub/supra-national scales, through the environment-making state (Woolf, 1990). It allows us to see how the tracing of an aesthetic frontier space was instrumental in sustaining the territorial integrity of the Roman political community. What we have to do is to explore how the dynamic of Roman political expansion was imbricated into the imperative to accumulate surpluses produced across the proto-world-system at that time, and how this imbrication was expressed in a certain kind of territorialization of social relations in the space of the frontier threshold, so as to generate politically subordinate de jure categories and de facto conditions for the production of citizens/non-citizen subjects.

The motivation behind this particular historical geography is to highlight recurrent practices, techniques, and apparatuses in the social production of space in the service of authority, especially that of the state. The key assemblage that coordinates and mediates a given knowledge-complex with the materialist imperatives of accumulation in the social production of space is the environment-making state, and civitas sine suffragio is an element in its repertoire of spatial control. Christian Parenti understands the ‘environment-making state’ as a ‘territory’ that is both ‘technological’ and ‘fundamentally geographic’ (Parenti, 2015, p. 831; Elden, 2013, p. 14). Generating the material space of citizenship is part of the cadastral function of the state, a state that ‘must also seize and open ‘nature’ more abstractly, by knowing it and making it legible; that is, by encasing it within the techno-managerial apparatus of administration, science, and governance’ (Parenti, 2015, p. 834). When it comes to the governing of accumulation, it is a historically iterated feature of capitalist reproduction that ‘the state, … plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes’ (Harvey, 2004, p. 74; see also Braudel, 1977; Marx, 1990: Part VIII). Citizenship is implicated as an aspect of this environment-making state by virtue of the knowledge it makes possible. This state is neither a vulgar assemblage of institutions and dirigeant individuals, nor an hypostasized entity that is possessed of agency (see Aronowitz & Bratsis, 2002; Block, 2020). However, nor can one reduce the state to a ‘metaphor’ or a mere ‘effect of power relations’ (Mitchell, 1990, p. 571; see Kalyvas, 2002). The environment-making state is rather closer to the (post)structuralist view of the state as state-power (see Althusser, 2014; Jessop, 2007; Poulantzas, 2014), a kind of geo-power (Ó Tuathail, 1996), which ‘guarantees the constellations of power outside of the state, in the family, the factory, the community, and so on’ (Burawoy, 1984, p. 11). Citizenship is one such knowledge-complex of this kind of environment-making state.

This role for the environment-making state is important, because it is the pivot around which a difficult problem in historical materialist analysis can be handled. The relationship between the production of space and the accumulation imperatives of a mode of production is a difficult one to mediate. There is a certain functionalism implied in the way we talk of accumulation ‘requiring’ a certain production of space (Harvey, 2010, 2015), and this has to be acknowledged. However, it is a core assumption that there is some sort of functionalist relationship at work here. The question is whether it can be presented in a way that is palatable. It has been remarked that Marxist theories have a tendency to treat the state as ‘a passive respondent to pressures and imperatives generated within civil society’ (Zeitlin, 1985, p. 25). The environment-making state helps to provide the functional connection with accumulation imperatives, but in a way that leaves open a space for political contestation, struggle, and agency in exactly how the state realizes this function.

This brings us finally to the concept of civitas sine suffragio. Literally meaning ‘citizenship without suffrage’, the concept provides us not merely with a departure point for understanding the occupation of the frontier threshold-space, but furnishes a concept that has a reflexive utility for developing our critical thinking on citizenship more broadly in the post-national context of a capitalist world-system (Marston & Mitchell, 2004; Soysal, 2004; Tambini, 2001). Given that there are ‘practical difficulties inherent in creating forms of citizenship that transcend the borders of traditional nation-states’ (Mathisen, 2006, p. 1013), civitas sine suffragio offers something of a ‘metaphorical or philosophical form of citizenship’ capable at least of sidestepping the nation-state container in our exploration of new forms and structures of citizenship (2006, p. 1012). The concept suggests how the spatial production of subjects in the frontier threshold might constitute a kind of figurative or materially de facto citizenship that exceeds the formal or juridical terms more conventional to the concept, and which explores the notion of citizenship in spatial, material, relational, and even phenomenal terms that are more fitting to a historical materialist geography of geo-power and social reproduction in a post-national ‘empire of capital’ (Wood, 2003)?

Government of accumulation in the Roman frontier

Whether slave, feudal, or capitalist, the socio-spatial apparatuses of a mode of production must meet the imperative to govern accumulation. Regardless of whatever constitutional or state form emerges in the struggle that takes place in the contradictions between accumulation and its government, the recurrence of a political aesthetic technique of inclusive-exclusion seems always to be apparent. This is the threshold space of accumulation. Every mode of production needs therefore to rediscover the space of civitas sine suffragio and to innovate constitutional topologies that are favourable to its effective realization. To understand the operation of civitas sine suffragio, we must then delve into the persistent territories of historical capitalism and beyond to identify its semi-stable recurrence and to see how it traverses the contradictions immanent to the logic of accumulation in a way resembling its operation in the threshold-space. As mentioned above, the frontier of the Roman Empire is a good place to start.

In a Schumpeterian vein (1951), it is hard to evade the impression that Roman political organization was driven by military exigencies (Drummond & Nelson, 1994; Harris, 1985; Richardson, 1998; Sherwin-White, 1996). However, from a historical materialist point of view, the expansion of Roman power was also driven by the imperative of accumulation (North, 1981; Sidebottom, 2005; Woolf, 1990). We must then navigate through the explicitly martial and juridical terminology of constitutional expansion in a manner sensitive to the socio-economic and cultural substratum visible through the dense complexity and ambiguity of how it was organized politico-militarily.

So what was the Roman frontier? Neither a circumferential radius, nor a clear line of delimitation separating one spatial extensio from another, the Roman frontier was one that simultaneously internalized as it externalized. Getting past the formalism of Roman government, William Harris perceptively recognized that the ‘terminology of roman control’ points in a direction other than formal annexation as the axiomatic of domination (Harris, 1985, p. 105, 135; see also Doyle, 1986, p. 30), and that the Romans had subtle means at their disposal for governing accumulation in a wider proto-world-system. Most crucially, in their governing of accumulation, there was ‘a progressive elaboration on the part of Romans and Italians of techniques of exploitation’ (North, 1981, p. 8), and these techniques constituted and reconstituted the frontier threshold-space.

Cognate with the English ‘liminal’, the limes (pl. limites) of the Roman Empire was the frontier, the border with neighbouring political entities, the limits of the formal power of Roman government (Mommsen, 1908). However, and more properly, the notion of a boundary to the empire was expressed in the terms fines or termini (Isaac, 1988, p. 126), with limes reserved for the complex of social relations around the termini of formal Roman government that ‘embraced both sides of the frontier and created a gradual transition from Roman to non-Roman society’ (Dyson, 1985, p. 3). As Drummond and Nelson point out in their analysis of the Western frontier, the Roman border provinces and Free Germany were not separated by the limes, but formed a single economic entity (1994:, p. 122), which is a notion not too dissimilar from Braudel’s Mediterranean (1996). As a system of defensive positions that brought the Roman and non-Roman as much into relation with each other as it simultaneously separated, the limes was a production of space rather than a delimitation of it. A semi-periphery carved out between both the core and the periphery, the limes was less a terminal ‘buffer’ than it was a ‘broadly homogeneous zone’ in its own right (Whittaker, 1989, p. 71; see also Mayerson, 1988). For example, integral to the limes were the system of roads that ran parallel to the frontier and connected the provinces with the imperial core, with each other, and even penetrated into the German lands. These constitutive roads of the limes produced a space and were not merely a fortified imperial circumference (Isaac, 1988, p. 126). Similarly, the space produced by the Roman frontier witnessed a comingling of religious practices and cultures into local, particular, and distinct synthetic constructs that differed from that to be found either in the so-called interior (core) or the exterior (Germany) of the formal empire in the West (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, pp. 196–212).

Though still bedevilled by the ‘container’ conceptualization of space, even Theodore Mommsen did at least seem to recognize that ‘the limes always had a dual structure, consisting of a strip of land marked on both sides, with both an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ border’ (Isaac, 1988, p. 130; see also Mommsen, 1908, pp. 456–464; Pelham, 1911, pp. 168–169).

Another production of the liminal space of Roman imperium can be found in the concept of Municipium. Root of the modern ‘municipality’, municipium provided a territorial instrument of inclusive-exclusion for the early Roman Republic in the form of a social contract. Through it was established a simultaneous citizenship of both Rome and whatever freshly absorbed provincial civitas a person happened to inhabit already (Nicholas, 1962, p. 63). This was ‘the invention of a double form of citizenship’, extended to peoples incorporated into the polity of an expanding Roman state-territory, establishing the terms of membership for ‘the [Roman] state as a whole combined with a local one for the individual community’ (Bringmann, 2007, pp. 32–33). The aim of this was to contrive, on a territorial basis, a juridico-territorial device congenial to metropolitan domination, whereby the very territoriality of the state itself expressed the asymmetric division in the burdens of citizenship (munus capere). Naturally, the relation rendered semi-citizens of municipia liable for military service, taxation, and other civic obligations, but, as civitates sine suffragio from ‘subject communities’ (2007:, pp. 32–33), it deprived them of the political rights of participation in the Roman state normally enjoyed by civitas optimo iure. Municipium represents then one of the earliest tracings of a frontier threshold-space, whereby the coextensive relation of inside and outside is territorialized in a juridico-territorial knowledge-complex, in order for an imperial type of social organization to be made possible and for the exploitation of one class, ethnos, or social fraction by another to be reproduced simultaneously in law, formal political structure, and in the social production of space.

Harris seems perhaps a little overhasty then to claim that there are ‘no special words to describe those who were outside the annexed provinces but none the less to some degree or other under roman power’. What have been rather misleadingly called clientes (Mommsen, 1887), or otherwise called amici or socii (Harris, 1985, p. 135), seem inadequate as designations for those subject to the liminal and penumbraic threshold-space of inclusive-exclusion that marked practices like municipium. In contrast, the expression civitas sine suffragio seems to capture quite well those subjected to this particular space of inclusive-exclusion, if not according to the letter of the law.

The liminal space afforded by the limes, municipium, and civitas sine suffragio gave Roman power the requisite structure for the simultaneous dispossession of surpluses whilst preventing full political enfranchisement of those so dispossessed. Although ‘most of the population of the empire was exploited to a greater or lesser degree’ (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, p. 173), the Roman frontier in the West in particular was ‘established, developed, administered for the benefit of the Romans, for which one may read ‘Italians’’, and one must remember that ‘Romanization was, at all times, designed to benefit the Romans, not the inhabitants of the frontier’ (1994:, p. 181). The unique properties of the Roman frontier facilitated ‘the production of a substantial surplus’, as well as ‘the growth of new markets to absorb that surplus’ in a way reminiscent of the modern colonial frontier space (1994:, p. 43). There is little doubt that ‘there was a rapid accumulation of resources in Rome and Italy at the expense of the rest of the Mediterranean world’ (North, 1981, p. 8), but what is important is that ‘Italy can be seen as profiting at the expense of peripheral areas long before they became provincialized’. By exploring the imperial frontier as a production of space, rather than as a formal institutional architecture, we can perceive spatial techniques in the government of accumulation that would otherwise remain opaque, insufficiently articulated, or simply invisible.

In terms of the political disavowal and disenfranchisement eternal to imperial formations (Hall, 2018; Hall et al., 2014; Hall & Pick, 2017), the imperial administration adopted every possible means of shifting the burden of securing the frontier upon the army and residents of that region (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, p. 173), for ‘if the government were to have recognised the growing civilian population of the frontier districts, it would have had to take the welfare of these people into account’ (1994:, p. 146). Romanization through devices such as municipium and civitas sine suffragio was therefore ‘never really a policy of raising native people to the level of Roman culture, but an administrative device with which to control the inhabitants of the provinces’ (1994:, p. 191). This threshold space had perpetually to be reproduced in the face of changing social forces and demographic pressures. As subjugated peoples were integrated into the Roman imperium, new semi-peripheral thresholds had to be inscribed afresh in peripheral social relations. The case of auxilia families is instructive.² Whilst veteran auxilia could be made citizens, their wives could not. However, citizenship was made available to the offspring of such a marriage. This was so as to exclude the spouses, whilst including the offspring as a future source of soldiery, and provided just ‘another means by which the government attempted to shift the burden of defence of the entire Western Empire onto the residents of its frontier’ (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, pp. 186–187). The ‘motivation for the policy of auxiliary enfranchisement became unavoidably clear … to exploit them as much as possible’ (1994:, p. 190), but of course whilst frustrating the aspiration to political recognition or suffrage.

The Romans ‘were disinclined to set firm limits to their territorial claims, preferring to regard all areas with which they had dealings as falling within their imperium’ (North, 1981, p. 8). The imperial ‘frontier society’ that emerged was therefore ‘neither completely Roman nor entirely barbarian, but an amalgamation of both and adapted to the peculiar circumstances of the frontier’ (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, p. 219; see also MacMullen, 1966, p. 231), peculiar circumstances that can become more legible when considered in light of the recurrent imperative to produce asymmetric threshold-spaces suitable for accumulation and domination. When the universal enfranchisement of 212AD rationalized away the ambiguity and liminality made possible by the frontier threshold, so as to counter the centrifugal forces of disintegration immanent to imperial expansion, it ‘eliminated the Roman administrator’s most effective tool in managing frontier affairs’ (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, p. 190), and thus fatally endangered the government of accumulation.

In the final analysis, as with other more recent imperial examples, the frontier of Roman power was insufficiently sustainable and durable in the face of historical contradictions and social forces that ultimately engendered crises. In sum, the problem then for imperial entities is that of sustaining the reproduction of the semi-periphery through the production of frontier threshold-spaces without threatening its integrity as an imperial entity. This is more than a knotty problem.

The imperative of accumulation means that ‘world-empire’ is predicated on expansion in one way or another (Wallerstein, 1976; Arrighi, 2010; Marx, 1993; Luxemburg, 2003). In World-System Analysis the ‘most obvious structural feature is the opposition between centre and periphery’ (Woolf, 1990, p. 46), and these structural features of empire ‘were a constant feature of the world scene for five thousand years’ (Wallerstein, 2011, p. 15). The ‘semi-peripheral zone’ in the Roman empire that Greg Woolf problematically locates ‘beyond the borders of the empire’, was nevertheless ‘mediated between the provinces and independent ‘barbaricum’’ by frontier threshold-spaces (1990:, p. 48). The breakdown of this semi-periphery marked a crisis in Rome’s government of accumulation (Drummond & Nelson, 1994, p. 165), and in so doing placed greater strain on the systemic integrity of the Roman Empire as a political entity.

The historical problem for accumulation regimes with which we are then left is a dialectical one. On the one hand, the disintegrations of imperialism, on the other, the long-term stasis of territorial homogeneity. Within these coordinates, the more effective and long-lasting environment-making state ceteris paribus is the one that can produce and reproduce most effectively the requisite frontier spaces for capital accumulation and political domination of an enduring semi-periphery, whether that be the Roman state, the modern European nation-state, or the transcontinental American federal state. This is the end for which the technique of civitas sine suffragio is recurrently innovated in the environment-making state’s social production of space.

Conclusion

One can see how citizenship is problematized in such a materialist approach to space and spatiality, especially when we are pressed to conceptualize citizenship in ways more fitting to supra-/sub-national socio-political formations. One potentially radical implication in this kind of historical materialist analysis is the way in which it brings citizenship into a relationship with geographies of class formation.

The threshold-space that produces and reproduces civitas sine suffragio could be seen as an isomorph of class formation geographically in the ‘social factory’ (see Tronti, 1973; Negri, 1992; Gill and Pratt, 2008). If we eschew class as either a mere status group or an hypostasizing sociological category fabricated out of identity-thinking, and instead embrace a properly historical materialist understanding of class as something generated in relation to the mode of production (see Welsh, 2019; Moraitis & Copley, 2017; Gunn, 1987), we can get closer to a geographical grasp of class formation as something produced out of those asymmetrical social relations of subordination and exploitation as experienced through a common spatial isomorph (Hardt & Negri, 2005, p. 100; Wood, 2016, p. 91). In this way, the threshold-space of civitas sine suffragio presents as a constitutor of class relations, a spatial isomorph of class, the generator of a common experience of dispossession and domination in a given accumulation regime. This is class formation in the social factory. However, as an abstract tool for analysis and critique, the concept of civitas sine suffragio has the capability to traverse the contours of a heterogenous population in a way that connects the common experience of threshold-spaces produced by the environment-making capitalist state. By articulating the shared experience constitutive of a class formation across categorial lines, a common subjectivity begins to emerge with the potential to transcend various other kinds of category or grouping.

In short, experience of the threshold-space becomes the ‘common shared element’ that establishes a class position in a mode of production and its accumulation regime (Hardt & Negri, 2005, p. 100; Welsh, 2016, 2022). Such an approach is especially fitting for a pluralist and post-national notion of citizenship (Moisio et al., 2020), or possibly ‘post-citizenship’, beyond the bourgeois container of the nation-state and its reinforcing liberal episteme. Why not therefore just ditch citizenship and speak directly of a transnational class? We have to speak of both simultaneously, because the relationship between the two is dialectical. The old is dying and the new cannot be born (Gramsci, 1971, p. 276).

Struggles over citizenship, then, are struggles to transform the state, civil society, and the terrain of participation by changing the webs of power relations in which individuals and social groups are positioned (Marston & Staeheli, 1994, p. 844).

Amid these struggles, the episteme of the nation-state is not dead, but its possible disintegrations open up a potentially post-national space, and into that space can be interpolated the conceptual shift from citizenship to class. Civitas sine suffragio militates conceptually toward the material relations of class, whilst nevertheless acknowledging the persistent production of citizenship within the container of the nation-state. The concept of civitas sine suffragio thus provides an important topographical structure in the struggles over citizenship formation, as well as the conceptual space for political ‘entrepreneurship’ that such formation forces upon subjects (Staeheli, 2007, p. 496; Ong, 2003).

In post-national transitions, the argument is that formal citizenship becomes decreasingly effective at protecting various subaltern categories, (i.e. migrant labourers and freshly dispossessed indigenous populations) from political domination and economic dispossession, given their consigned fate in the de facto class-citizenship of the threshold-space. But in this kind of ‘popular, lived citizenship’ (Staeheli, 2010, p. 397), many are nudged into ‘suspended spaces of citizenship in which neither cosmopolitan nor national citizenship seem relevant’ (Staeheli, 2010, p. 397).

Since the 1990s, a sanguine discourse around ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ has become widespread (Archibugi, 2008; Held, 1995; Ong, 1999). The tendency in liberal discourses around citizenship has been towards a more inclusive and universal notion of citizenship, and ‘particularly since the end of the Cold War, increasing attention has been paid to changing concepts of citizenship in the context of the globalization of the economy’ (Mathisen, 2006, p. 1011; see also Vasta, 2000). However,

even though values and practices of liberal citizenship are often promoted as being cosmopolitan or even universal, they can only be understood in terms of the specific spatialities and temporalities that reflect contested experiences and histories of place (Staeheli, 2018, p. 62).

The technique of civitas sine suffragio indicates not the unifying trend toward world citizenship (Carter, 2001; Kymlicka, 1995), but a historical materialist ‘citizenship’ repeatedly bestowed upon the exploited, appropriated, and dominated in the interests of accumulation, regardless of the ‘ideological work done by calls for cosmopolitan, postnational, and global citizenship’ (Staeheli, 2010, p. 396). Civitas sine suffragio therefore takes the problematic of citizenship less as ‘a process of negotiation between established values and the values of newcomers into a society’ (Mathisen, 2006, p. 1011), and even less as a ‘formal juridical status based on fixed principles’. Instead, it moves us towards a class-citizenship realized in the experience of a threshold-space that is produced in order to govern a population in terms of accumulation imperatives. That space repeatedly inscribes and reproduces renewed penumbrae of differentiation and division into the medium of social relations, working along the contours of other sociological categories of subordination. Therefore, far from avoiding ‘the divisiveness of racial, religious, and ethnic affiliations’ through an inclusive citizenship of ‘social cooperation’ (Aleinikoff, 2001: vii), it actually works through and alongside those very cleavages (Ross and Welsh, 2021). Having said this, these contours are neither neat nor complete, and common subjectivities produced in threshold-spaces have the potential, when properly articulated and mobilized as such, to cut across extant categories in ways that can allow us to conjure a common consciousness of shared subjectivity toward fresh solidarities in common purpose.

Maybe we should not assume that formal citizenship provides an unambiguous architecture for democratic self-determination or political security. Within a critical geopolitics, an archaeo-genetic exploration of the frontier threshold-spaces in the world-system produced by the environment-making state can bring out recurrent spatial techniques of inclusive exclusion in the government of accumulation, spaces which also establish the quasi-imperial asymmetries increasingly familiar in the post-national state. Perhaps the task is now to investigate and account for those vulnerable subjects and insecure subjectivities produced in the threshold-space, and to bring the abstract into relation with the concrete through empirical research into the conceptual space of civitas sine suffragio. Only then will we truly determine its worth as a critical concept.

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John Welsh

John Welsh is a researcher in political economy, history, and geography at the University of Helsinki. Recent journal articles can be found in Geopolitics, Anthropological Theory, Utopian Studies, Capital & Class, Social Anthropology, Contemporary Political Theory, and the International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society.

Notes

1 The added benefit of such a deep archaeological dig is that it establishes a Verfremdungseffekt in the historical distancing that such an analysis entails, provoking and disturbing in a way that directly contemporary analysis might not. It is a historical style of theorizing that ‘helps us to distance ourselves from thinking in terms of contemporary paradigms, unquestioned conventions, given constellations of alternatives or implicit value judgements’ (Palonen, 2003: 102).

2 Auxilia were soldiers recruited into the armies of Rome from the non-citizen elements of the population, usually on the imperial peripheries and frontiers of the Empire.